Page 229 of The Sun He Buried

“Asta will kill you,” she says, breathless.

“She’ll have to find the rest of me first.” The stockings next, one and then the other, my hands taking their time down her legs. Then the last thin layer, peeled away and dropped—until she’s bare on my table in the cold air, and I’m still dressed where she isn’t, and the difference in that goes through her like a current. The bond hands me exactly what it does to her: how exposed she is, how much she likes being the only one of us undone.

“There you are.” I take all of her in—laid out, shaking, mine. “I’ve wanted you like this longer than I’ve let myself admit. You’re better than I made myself imagine.”

She reaches for me. I catch both her wrists and press them to the table above her head, pin them there under one hand, and lean my weight down just enough that she understands they’re staying.

“Keep them where I put them,” I tell her. “Or I stop.”

She tests the grip once, out of pride. I don’t give. She goes still under my hand, wrists crossed, and the surrender of it—chosen, furious, willing—pours down the bond and nearly costs me my patience on the spot.

I don’t hurry. I’ve waited too long to rush it now.

I put my free hand on her and take my time. Her throat. The weight of her breasts, the tight peak of each one until she arches up into my palm. The soft plane of her stomach—everywhere but where the bond is screaming she needs me. She’s drenched already; I feel the ache of it in her like it’s mine, winding tighter with every place I touch that isn’t the one she wants.

“Eirik.” Half a plea. “Please—”

“Not yet.” I roll a nipple between my fingers and feel the jolt of it fire down both of us. “You walked into my room and told me to stop hiding. Now I’ll have you the way I want you. Slow. Until you can’t remember being angry with me.”

“I’m already—”

“Not nearly enough.”

I drag one knuckle down through the wet of her at last, and stop just short of where she needs me.

I could give it to her without a word.

“Tell me what you want, sweetheart. Out loud.”

The word does something to her. I feel it go through her, feel her clench around nothing. Her chin comes up anyway. “You already—”

“I know what you want. I asked you to say it. Beg me properly, and it’s yours.”

“Your mouth.” Scarlet. Furious. Soaked. “Put your mouth on me. Please—”

“Good girl.”

I go down.

My mouth is the part of me that feeds, and I open it over the wettest, softest part of her, and every instinct I own says take. I don’t. I lick into her instead, slow and filthy, and the first taste of her nearly finishes me on its own.

Then the bond turns it obscene. I taste her and feel her feel it—my tongue on her clit from her side, the pleasure of giving it from mine, folded together until I lose which mouth belongs to who. She grinds up into my face and I let her, hold her thighs wide and eat her like I’ve got nowhere better to be for the rest of my life.

“That’s it,” I say into her, and she jolts at the words against her skin. “Ride my face. Take it. I feel every second of what I’m doing to you.”

She swears—filthy, breathless, my name lost in the middle of it. I push two fingers into her while I suck her clit, curl them to the spot the bond’s already handed me, and she comes apart against my mouth with a sound that isn’t language. Her release drives straight up into me so hard my hips buck into nothing—hers on my tongue, mine stolen off hers, one climax going off in two bodies.

I don’t stop. I lick her through it and past it, fingers working, until she’s twitching and sobbing and trying to shut her legs—and I hold them open and drag one more out of her because I want it.

“Eirik—” Wrecked. “I can’t—”

“You can. You will.” I give her the second one anyway, feel it tear through both of us, and lift my mouth wet with her to the chin.

“I’m not feeding,” I tell her, teeth to her pulse.

“I know.”

Then she gets a hand between us, opens my trousers—and slides off the table down onto her knees on the cold stone in front of me, and the bond tells me what she wants before her mouth does.